Face to Face: writer Martin Cathcart Froden

“It is a really powerful environment to just go in for a day. In the class everyone was quite nice; we talked about books. I could make their life better by having a nice time when we were doing it but I couldn’t affect their life more than that. I tried to work out, why am I feeling so ‘Ohhh’,” the 37-year-old says, frustratedly lifting his hands to his head.

“At first I thought, is it the weather? I used to cycle back from there. But I hadn’t quite realised the power of the building and the architecture.”

Sitting by the full-length window of Stravaigin in Glasgow’s West End, watching the world go by outside, he looks around: “This is a lovely place, which is why we met here and not McDonald’s. I got really interested in what it must be like to live in a space for a long time if you have no chance of changing it. I guess if you count the number of hours you are somewhere, if you sleep and eat and spend a lot of time there that is your home, by definition.

“To live in a neutral place, or a place where you don’t have any control over it must do quite strange things to you. I guess the most extreme form of that is when you put someone in isolation. For us as a society to say that is the ultimate, for the worst offence you can’t even see other people let alone other textures.”

The outcome of his research will be published in a new novel. Before then, his first book Devil Take the Hindmost is out next year, after beating 500 other entrants from around the world to win the Dundee International Book Prize. As well as a cash prize of £10,000, the award gives Froden a publishing deal with Glasgow-based Freight Books to bring the story of a hapless Scot newly arrived in London in the 1920s who finds himself embroiled in a world of moneylenders and cycling race fixing, to the public.

It was produced while Swedish-born Froden, who has only been writing fiction in English for five years, studied for his MLitt in Glasgow. Then edited and fine-tuned on two-hour lunch breaks in Greenock.

“You couldn’t really leave. Well, it was such a faff it wasn’t worth it. I just printed the book and sat and read and edited it. I guess it’s a place designed so that there is absolutely nothing else to do – even though I was perfectly innocent,” he laughs, holding up his hands.

“Editing is both exciting and quite dull, and reading your own stuff for the 30th time kind of messes with your mind. It was really good to have that focused space.”

Working in a prison might be an unusual job for some writers but not this one, whose CV includes fruit picker, greengrocer, sound engineer and magazine editor. It all makes his current work as a PhD student, with an office in an ornate university tenement building in the heart of the west end, all seem rather mundane.

“I quite enjoy change, I suppose. And I’ve moved around a lot too, so I guess you need to do something wherever you are,” he agrees.

“The avocado picking was when I lived on a kibbutz in Israel that was 500 metres from Lebanon and 500 metres from the Mediterranean. It was a beautiful setting in a really dangerous place. The locals were all like: ‘Oh, it’s just rockets, you know. It’s just Hezbollah’.

“The border was among hills and they called the area where the kibbutz was rocket shadow, so they thought they were really safe because of the trajectory. But that’s not something to write home about: Mum, I’m safe, I’m in rocket shadow.”

Froden grew up in the east of Sweden, just south of Stockholm, with his younger biological sister and adopted twins.

“I’ve got quite a funny family. My mum and dad adopted two children from Ethiopia, from Addis Ababa. They are not related but they are not sure when they were born because they were from an orphanage. On paper they are twins but they’re not related in any way,” he explains.

He was 12 by the time the twins, babies at the time, arrived in the family home. Though his parents’ marriage broke up during the lengthy adoption process, Froden has memories of a happy, busy home.

“I think it’s odd having any sibling, both odd and great. I don’t know if I was mature enough to understand what was going to happen. I’ve never thought too much about it. It wasn’t a big upheaval, it was just like having more people in the house. I think we get on really well as a family,” he says.

With his siblings now in London, New York and Sweden, his parents on opposite sides of the country in Sweden, and the arrival of a half-sister after his father remarried, Froden refers to the various biological bonds that make up his family and laughs when he refers to the geographic problems involved in making festive arrangements.

That spirit of embracing change took Froden off to Canada’s Vancouver Island as an exchange student at the age of 17. Returning to Sweden and forced to re-take his final year at high school after discovering the months in Canada didn’t count, led to studying linguistics.

“I realised I wasn’t very good at it – and I don’t know who would be. It’s interesting in a pub quiz setting but it’s not when you get into it. To break language into equations of a + b + c = this. It’s interesting to see how we organise thoughts, like a bird, and then what kind of bird. So it’s a finch, but what kind of finch? Is it a male finch or a female finch? I think I was interested in it but not enough to pursue it,” he says.

The trip to Israel followed, and then six months in Buenos Aires before returning to Sweden to work as a sound engineer and live north of the Arctic Circle on the border with Finland.

“That was also very strange, just in terms of light. If it was 4 o’clock you wouldn’t know which 4 o’clock it was. Conversely on the other side of the year it would be pitch black. And Finland is an hour ahead of Sweden, so we’d go out until 3am in Finland and then the pubs would close and in 15 minutes we would go back over the border and have another 45 minutes until the Swedish 3am,” he laughs.

An internship at a recording studio brought him to London, where Froden met his Glaswegian wife Lucy. They lived in Sweden for a while, where their son was born, and then moved to Glasgow where the two younger children came into the world. The couple had been part of Glasgow band Tall Tales – “half of the band has moved away, so it’s on hold for the moment” – though Froden says he feels with writing he gets enough of a creative output.

“If I have an hour here or there I can write. With a band the logistics make it difficult. Someone said the best musicians are the ones with the strongest back because you can carry stuff. Unless your back gives out before you’re 40 you should be OK,” he laughs.

Though Froden’s father is a businessman, he says growing up he wasn’t short of creative influences with his musical mother who sung in choirs, and his sister who is an illustrator.

“My mum is really arty, we talk a lot about culture and she reads a lot and my dad is an entrepreneur. I guess if you mixed them, being a writer kind of makes sense. You have to be self-propelled and believe in what you do. No-one is going to ask you to do it, you have to work out your own deadlines,” he says.

“The arts are a big part of what we did at home but maybe more consuming than producing. There has always been an easy dialogue to talk about the creative process.”

He enjoys writing short stories and thrives on the theme and deadlines imposed in competitions. In the meantime, Froden is collaborating with a photographer, writing pieces of fiction for his pictures.

“He takes a lot of photos of scarecrows and has a whole series of really quite sinister-looking ones. I don’t know if birds are scared by the same things we are. I had a brief look at the photos and wrote a long story,” he explains.

“He also works on an oil rig. I’ve not told him yet but I’m working on an oil rig piece that I’m going to send to him so that it is not always me responding to his photos. Now he has to change what he takes pictures of.

“It ties in with the prison work: it’s a very male environment, you’re cut off from civilisation, you live in a little cell, and it’s a dry environment – there’s no alcohol. It’s a monk-like existence, or voluntary prison.”